Arts & Culture

Mauro Sheridan Prospers With Prospero

by | Jun 7, 2022 8:52 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Stephen Julien and cast.

The band room at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School was full of students getting into their costumes, changing into sailors and spirits, monsters and magicians. They donned robes and fixed their crowns of flowers, then congregated onstage.

How does everyone feel in their costumes?” asked co-director Justin Pesce.

Good,” said one student. Hot,” said another. If they were all still wearing masks due to Covid concerns, it was a detail; what mattered was that, after two years, Mauro Sheridan was mounting its 2022 production of The Tempest, in collaboration with Elm Shakespare Company, in person.

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Fair Haven Flourishes At Quinnipiac Riverfest

by | Jun 6, 2022 3:01 pm | Comments (7)

Olivia Charis photos

Azucena Rojas with her mom and business partner, Angeles Romero.

At the 10th annual Quinnipiac Riverfest on Saturday.

Fair Haven businesswoman Azucena Rojas moved her Mexican grocery outdoors for the day — and further connected with the neighborhood she calls home — during a festive, sun-dappled 10th annual Quinnipiac Riverfest.

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Stetson Library Celebrated At Dixwell Fest

by | Jun 6, 2022 12:30 pm | Comments (1)

Jordan Ashby Photos

Families hula hooping at Saturday's festivities.

Members of the Concerned Citizens for the Greater New Haven Dixwell Community House.

Lance Legion looked out on a Dixwell Avenue bustling with dance, music, art, and laughter — all in front of a reborn Q” House community center and a relocated and expanded Stetson Library. 

I’m really happy about the changes they made,” he said with a smile, holding his son in the afternoon sunshine. Growing up, I’ve always wanted to come to the Q’ House, so it’s nice to see it’s open and that they’re finally giving back to the community.” 

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Artists Have Brush With The Past

by | Jun 3, 2022 9:07 am | Comments (0)

A cluster of paintings on the wall of the gallery all border a central piece, as if feeding it, which in a sense they do. The central piece holds the others together. In it, a yard bordered by trees is the site of some kind of excavation, roped off. Something is being unearthed there, the ruins of a house, or something still older, maybe. But instead of a crew with tools, the only animals in sight are a cardinal and a bluejay, watching over the proceedings in a moment that’s both funny and a little magical, a flight of fancy on the part of the artist, though very much grounded in reality.

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Bills, Blight Bedevil Clock Shop Project

by | Jun 2, 2022 5:57 pm | Comments (16)

Thomas Breen photo

The derelict former clock factory building at 133 Hamilton St.

Markeshia Ricks photo

Redeveloper Scott Reed at 2018 alder hearing. His company allegedly owes city $137K in back taxes.

Has the clock stopped on a long-delayed effort to convert a derelict former Hamilton Street factory into 130 affordable apartments?

The property’s Oregon-based developer says the project is still moving forward. Three years of unpaid property taxes, a recent default in a tax foreclosure court case, and a spate of city anti-blight and building safety citations suggest a different story.

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Wave Of New Albums Points To Summer Awakening

by | Jun 2, 2022 8:59 am | Comments (0)

Them Airs.

Exploded Whip,” from the new album of the same name by the New Haven-based Them Airs, starts with chiming guitars, keys, and bass, a steady rhythm with skittering beats beneath it. He drive exploded car,” the vocalist sings, he never intended to die / I watched as he spun out / turned his human skin outside.” The dark surrealism of the lyrics is set at an oblique angle to a song that sounds written by musicians with a lot of experience, yet who are still bursting with ideas. 

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Two Bands Make Never Ending Books Bounce

by | Jun 1, 2022 8:46 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Beach Side Property.

Two high-energy bands — Beach Side Property and Seeing Double — shook the floorboards of Never Ending Books on Tuesday night, turning the State Street community space into a frenzied dance club.

The Shoreline-based emo band Beach Side Property — Kate Burton on guitar and vocals, Ruby DeGoursey on bass and vocals, Patrick LaLonde on guitar and backing vocals, and Ryan Shea on drums — immediately tore into a set of mostly originals with a cover or two sprinkled in for good measure that showcased what the band was all about: tight musicianship, sharp songwriting, and the ability to draw and hold a crowd. Shea on drums was a constant source of propulsion, while DeGoursey’s muscular bass playing provided pulse, rumble, and slyly sophisticated harmonies. On guitars, Burton and LaLonde created shifted textures of sound out of one hook after another. All this was the grounding for Burton and DeGoursey’s earnest, funny lyrics, delivered with a lot of heart and a sly grin. If the lyrics were often about anxieties, heartbreak, and insecurity, the voices of people moving into an uncertain future, the music itself conveyed a constant message of strength and hope — a message amplified by the sheer amount of fun the band was obviously having playing music together. That enjoyment was infectious, packing the room of Never Ending Books with cheering, dancing fans, and giving the touring band that followed the warm-up they deserved.

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Perennial Comes Alive "In The Midnight Hour"

by | May 31, 2022 9:05 am | Comments (0)

Perennial Photo

Perennial.

Come on can you do the skeleton dance? Can you foxtrot from the crypt? Can you waltz three four five six? Yeah, it goes like this, it goes like this,” sings vocalist and keyboardist Chelsey Hahn before she and the rest of the post-hardcore power-punk band Perennial — Chad Jewett on vocals and guitar and Wil Mulhern on drums — create an absolute onslaught of sound that could both wake the dead and get them on the dance floor. 

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Sarah Dunn Proves The Concept

by | May 31, 2022 9:00 am | Comments (0)

Dunn.

It was kind of like I was squished so hard it leaked out,” Sarah Dunn said of her first EP, Thank You — coming out this Saturday, June 4, with a release party at Gather on Upper State Street — and the torrent of songwriting that followed, in between shifts in nursing homes during the depths of the pandemic. I happened upon a very strange way of having silence, and it allowed the space inside my head to put things down that maybe had been festering there for a while. I didn’t have the opportunity before, but suddenly I was provided the time, so I did it.”

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Silence Broken On Mental Health

by | May 30, 2022 9:40 am | Comments (1)

Laura Glesby Photo

Sarya Provite leads dance in rain at mental health awareness fair.

Baron Von Leek” felt nervous at the prospect of talking to others about mental illness for years, he said as rain poured from the sky.

An hour later, sunshine surprised Jocelyn Square Park — and Von Leek found himself rapping about his self-diagnosed schizophrenia to a moved audience of mental health activists and stigma-breakers.

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Spencer Luckey Keeps Climbing

by | May 27, 2022 8:29 am | Comments (4)

The pulsating orb-like structure in the Liberty Science Center appears to float, impossibly, high above the heads of people walking below, as if it’s lighter than air, or underwater. The fact that it isn’t just a sculpture, but in fact a playground for children, only adds to its improbable whimsy. Liberty Science Center is in Jersey City, N.J., but the shop that designed and built the orb, Luckey Climbers, is right in New Haven, on East Street. Its chief architect, Spencer Luckey, has been around the playground design business all his life. He took over the company from his father, and has made dozens of climbers for clients all over the world. But he also has a vision for the Elm City.

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Property Roundup: Nonprofit Buys Ely House For $800K; LCI Buys Blighted 3-Family

by | May 26, 2022 4:41 pm | Comments (2)

A sculpture by artist Yvonne Shortt on display outside 51 Trumbull St.

Clockwise from upper left: ECOCA board members Suneet Talpade, Jeanne Criscola, Debbie Hesse, Jeanne Ciravolo.

A downtown visual arts nonprofit has closed on its purchase of the John Slade Ely House — warding off the building’s potential sale to a residential developer, with the help of a loan from two Fair Haven businessmen.

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Long Wharf Lays Out New Direction In 2022-23 Season

by | May 26, 2022 9:25 am | Comments (7)

Brian Slattery Photos

Ingui.

So did you hear? We’re moving,” said Kit Ingui, managing director of Long Wharf Theatre, to appreciative laughter Wednesday evening at the Stetson branch library in Q House on Dixwell Avenue. Ingui, Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón, Mayor Justin Elicker, branch manager Diane X Brown, and Arts & Ideas Executive Director Shelley Quiala were there to announce Long Wharf’s plans for its 2022 – 23 season, as it moves out of the space it has occupied on Sargent Drive for years and moves into an itinerant model, bringing theater directly into New Haven’s communities.

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Blues & Rock Mix With Showmanship & Sincerity At Intimate Cafe Nine Double Bill

by | May 26, 2022 9:24 am | Comments (0)

On Wednesday night, Cafe Nine hosted a gem of a show to a small but captivated audience. Blues and rock were the musical selling points, but the artists who shared the stage all brought an extra dimension — that of showmanship and sincerity — that can only happen in small venues like the New Haven club.

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Artists Meditate On The "Proximity" Of War

by | May 25, 2022 8:47 am | Comments (1)

The foggy, paranoid view through the peephole of a door to an apartment. A painting of a container ship erupting into flames. A gas can looking ready to be ignited. They come across as a dislocated parts of a whole, tiny fragments of something too big to comprehend all at once. They’re part of Proximity,” a show running now in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through June 8, in which artists come to grips with the war in Ukraine, producing an exhibit that conveys the conflict’s harrowing immediacy and something of its historical context at the same time.

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Artist Makes Own Traffic-Calming Measures

by | May 24, 2022 8:14 am | Comments (26)

You may have seen the signs at the exit ramps of I‑91 or I‑95 around town, or on long straightaways on Whitney Avenue, or that particular curve of road on Mather Street in Hamden. They say Slow Down,” and they’re clearly directed at car traffic. Neatly stenciled and uniform in size, some of them look quasi-official. But they’re not.

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Yale Rep Holds Up A Dark Funhouse Mirror To History

by | May 23, 2022 8:21 am | Comments (0)

T. Charles Erickson

We gonna talk about war and genocide and PTSD and molestation. So it’s OK to laugh,” says Larry (Justin Gauthier), the amiable host of Between Two Knees, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through June 4. He reappears in a variety of guises and his deadpan commentary is one of the best things in the show. He enters the stage on a lift through a trapdoor, looking like an icon of Native American tribal lore, and he ends the show in a kind of glam Native American spacesuit, a way of saying that the people who were the earliest human inhabitants of the American continent will always be here, no matter what the future holds.

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